Trump ‘willing to talk’ to Iran as it retaliates amid US-Israel attacks.

People mourn the killing of Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei at a rally in Tehran, Iran, on Sunday, March 1, 2026, a day after he was killed in coordinated U.S. and Israeli airstrikes. (Arash Khamooshi/The New York Times)

By AARON BOXERMAN, FARNAZ FASSIHI, HELENE COOPER, ZOLAN KANNO-YOUNGS and TYLER PAGER

A day after a joint U.S.-Israeli military operation unleashed a bombing wave across Iran and killed Iran’s supreme leader, the attacks intensified Sunday by land and sea. Iran launched retaliatory strikes against Israel and several Persian Gulf countries, and the United States reported its first casualties of the conflict.

Amid fears of a wider conflagration with no clear endgame, President Donald Trump said that Iran’s new leadership wanted to speak to him and that he was willing to do so. “They should have done it sooner,” Trump told The Atlantic magazine from his residence in Florida. The Iranian government did not publicly respond to his remarks.

The White house spokesperson, Karoline Leavitt, said that Trump spoke Sunday with the leaders of Bahrain, Israel and the United Arab Emirates. Those consultations took place as Iran, and the regional balance of power, were shaken by the killing of the nation’s longtime supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, in an Israeli missile strike based on U.S. intelligence. Trump called afterward for the Iranian people to “take control.”

Three U.S. troops were killed in action at a base in Kuwait, the Pentagon said Sunday, the first Americans to die in the war with Iran. At least nine people were killed in Israel, and at least four people were killed in attacks across the UAE, Kuwait, Qatar, Bahrain and Oman, according to official reports tallied by The New York Times.

The Israeli military said Sunday that its air force was again bombarding “the heart of Tehran,” the Iranian capital. The military said it had struck Iranian missile launchers, air defense systems, command centers and headquarters of the government, and missile launchers.

The United States continued a barrage of strikes Sunday targeting Iran’s ballistic missile program and trying to sink the Iranian navy, a U.S. Central Command official said. U.S. stealth bombers, armed with 2,000-pound bombs, struck Iran’s “hardened” ballistic missile facilities. U.S. strikes destroyed the headquarters of Iran’s Revolutionary Guard and sank at least one warship, the military said.

Iran’s top national security official, Ali Larijani, earlier Sunday announced that an interim committee would run the country until a successor to the supreme leader was chosen.

Here’s what else to know:

— Oil tanker ablaze: Videos verified by the Times showed an oil tanker, the Skylight, ablaze off the coast of Oman on Sunday. It was one of three ships in the Persian Gulf that reported coming under attack after Iran’s Revolutionary Guard claimed it had targeted U.S. and British tankers in the region.

— School death toll: Iranian state media reported that dozens of children had been killed at a girls’ elementary school near a naval base. The death toll at Shajarah Tayyebeh school in southern Iran rose to at least 115 people Sunday, according to Iranian state and state-affiliated media. It appears to be one of the worst mass casualty events of the American-Israeli bombing campaign so far.

— American casualties: U.S. Central Command said that several other troops “sustained minor shrapnel injuries and concussions and are in the process of being returned to duty.” Two military officials said that an Army base housing U.S. troops in Kuwait was one of the U.S. bases in the region that were hit in retaliatory Iranian strikes.

— Strikes in Israel: Iranian missile barrages repeatedly targeted Israel on Sunday, forcing much of the country into fortified shelters. The Israeli ambulance service said the nine people killed and nearly 30 others wounded in Beit Shemesh, a city about 18 miles west of Jerusalem, amounted to the worst casualty event in Israel since the conflict started.

— Iranian succession: The strikes killed several other senior Iranian figures in addition to the supreme leader, Iranian state media said. The power to choose a new supreme leader rests with the Assembly of Experts, a conservative body of clerics. In the meantime, Iran’s president, the head of the judiciary and a jurist of the clerical Guardian Council will be in charge.

— Shipping effects: The fighting shut down shipping through the Strait of Hormuz, the conduit for one-fifth of the world’s oil supply, according to shipping companies and Tasnim, Iran’s semiofficial state media. Maersk said it was halting some shipping through the Red Sea, hundreds of miles to the west.